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| 3rd September 2011 |
Sunday Herald |
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[Sunday Herald] "the clarity of tone and ideas from Hall's sopranino, soprano and tenor saxophones and clarinet, and Lyall's beautifully considered improvising and accompaniments, makes Blithe Spirit an album to return to often."
Rob Adams | |
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| 28th October 2010 |
The Scotsman **** |
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[Scotsman****] "..real clarity of purpose and execution, playing off each other in creative fashion." | |
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| 4th October 2010 |
The Herald **** |
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[Herald ****] "It's the mark of a special band that it can keep surprising its audience all the way to the end of a gig...another triumph "
Rob Adams
See full review below under Reviews | |
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| 2nd September 2010 |
Shetland Times |
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[Shetland Times] "On all four instruments he has an awesome level of control as well as expression, championing the playing of modern jazz on clarinet, not common by any means, as well as promoting the sopranino [saxophone] as a credible musical force.
see full review below under Reviews | |
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| 28th July 2010 |
Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD ***(*) |
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[Penguin Guide to Jazz ***(*)] "Hall has strong ideas and a playful sense of form." | |
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| 27th July 2010 |
The Scotsman |
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[Scotsman] "Vibrant, often evocative ... he has a gift for writing bright, sinuous melodies over attractive rhythmic grooves fleshed out in turn with rich and often intricate harmonies."
Kenny Mathieson | |
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| 26th July 2010 |
The Guardian |
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[Guardian] "An intelligent and sensitive improviser and a fast developing composer who has tackled all kinds of settings from orchestras to duos."
John Fordham, | |
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| 26th July 2010 |
Jazz Journal International |
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[Jazz Journal] "It's encouraging to hear a musician like Rob Hall blowing saxophone and clarinet in such a melodious way"
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| 26th July 2010 |
Inverness Courier |
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[Inverness Courier] "Innovative, beautifully balanced, strong and exciting ... worth going the extra mile to hear."
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| 3rd September 2011 |
Sunday Herald |
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CD Review SUNDAY HERALD 28 Aug 2011
Rob Hall & Chick Lyall
Blithe Spirit (FMR)
From their bases on either side of Scotland's central belt, saxophonist Rob Hall and pianist Chick Lyall take their music to audiences across Europe - they played in Italy ealier this month - and their international standing is reflected in the quality of this, their third album. These are musicians whose offstage conversations - whether they are reminiscing about Keith Jarrett's great 1970's Scandinavian band, discussing classical harmony or considering their favourite Scottish landscapes - seem to continue entirely naturally when instruments replace voices. Whichever sphere they operate in, they're always informed by striking melodies such as the very brisk, penetrating theme of Hall's The Regime or Lyall's lilting title track. Even on the handful of more abstract pieces that punctuate the track list, the atmosphere remains conversational, a quality that along with the clarity of tone and ideas from Hall's sopranino, soprano and tenor saxophones and clarinet, and Lyall's beautifully considered improvising and accompaniments, makes Blithe Spirit an album to return to often.
Rob Adams | |
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| 29th July 2011 |
The Scotsman **** |
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| Scotsman, 29 July 2011
Rob Hall and Chick Lyall with Susheila Jamieson
The Hub, Edinburgh Jazz Festival
SAXOPHONIST Rob Hall has worked with visual artists before, notably in a project incorporating the paintings of James Hawkins at the Highland Festival a decade ago. Here he revealed that the idea of using photographer Susheila Jamieson’s evocative images in this concert had come from the jazz festival’s co-director, Roger Spence.
It proved to be a good one. Her artistically observed and beautifully captured images, ranging from landscapes to semi-abstract forms, complemented the music in organic fashion. In fact, this was a concert where all the elements – the evocative music, the projections, the venue, even the early evening start – all came together in pretty much an ideal way.
Hall and pianist Chick Lyall have been collaborating for some time, and the material from their new third CD revealed a further refinement in their musical union.
It was difficult at times to work out where notated music became improvisation. Some of the set – Rondeau was a prime example – could easily have been through-composed, and they certainly had plenty of written music. As Lyall unfolded another lengthy score across the piano, Hall remarked wryly that “every job has its paperwork”.
This was a genuine meeting of minds. Hall alternated between clarinet and three saxophones, tenor, soprano and sopranino (the smallest and highest of the family).
The music was varied enough to prevent any longueurs, while three short, more abstract pieces also reflected Lyall’s long-standing interest in electronic music.
KENNY MATHIESON | |
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| 4th October 2010 |
The Herald **** |
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CHICK LYALL-ROB HALL QUARTET, Glasgow Art Club
****
It's the mark of a special band that it can keep surprising its audience all the way to the end of a gig.
That’s what pianist Chick Lyall and saxophonist Rob Hall did here, continually finding different routes for their quartet to explore. As well as playing robustly melodic saxophone, Hall is the spokesman introducing a repertoire that, in the first set, began with Steve Swallow’s elegantly twisting Falling Grace and ended with Hall’s own Pied Piper, which puts a dancey bounce into the steps of Hamelin’s exiting rats.
Lyall’s contributions come entirely from the page and the keyboard. A player who occasionally appears to slip off the radar, he always returns with his considerable talents enriched. He long ago absorbed the more gospel influenced, down-home side of Keith Jarrett and the folk tradition- inspired romanticism of Bobo Stenson into a flowing, investigative style of his own and the resourcefulness that results created a string of solos that had this listener, at least, hanging on to every final note of resolution. His compositions come from various sources of inspiration and in that regard complement Hall’s splendidly.
The second set found them recreating Hall’s Bizzyberry written for the Biggar Big Band, in a guise that updated Jarrett’s Scandinavian quartet, exploring free improvisation with clarinet, a boogaloo beat and a bebop pay-off, and rattling through a jazz jig before ending with a rare jazz quartet reading of Ralph Towner’s gorgeous Icarus. They were helped no end by bassist Jennifer Clark lending sure backbone and Andrew Bain’s beautifully restrained drumming in another triumph for the new Bridge Music Glasgow Jazz Series.
ROB ADAMS | |
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| 2nd September 2010 |
Shetland Times |
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ROB HALL & CHICK LYALL
Live Review - Shetland Times - May 2010
A little musical magic was conjured into being at a couple of Shetland venues over the last weekend. Playing what is probably best described as chamber jazz, saxophonist Rob Hall and pianist Chick Lyall enthralled audiences in Bixter Hall and Lerwick Town Hall with original music that was at times highly expressive, free and fluid, beautifully romantic, exquisitely technical and always most pleasing to the ear.
The music draws on classical, contemporary jazz, Celtic and Nordic influences to deliver memorable musical sketches of depth and imagination and it came as no surprise to learn that both musicians have accomplished complementary employment as classical performers.
Rob Hall plays tenor and soprano saxes, the quite unusual sopranino sax, almost like a toy instrument, which plays an octave above an alto sax, and his first love, clarinet. He told us that he champions the playing of modern jazz on clarinet, not common by any means, as well as promoting the sopranino as a credible musical force. On all four instruments he has an awesome level of control as well as expression. Chick Lyall plays with such single-mindedness and concentrated attention that the listener is drawn into the pianist's intensely sensitive musical journey, gently coaxed to share and enjoy the experience. Comparisons have been made elsewhere to the work of Jan Garbarek and Keith Jarrett and this listener would not argue with that or regard it as an over-the-top exaggeration.
The duo largely played music from the repertoire of their last two albums on the contemporary/improvised label FMR, The Beaten Path and the recently released Rhyme and Reason. The title track from the first album begins with a piano section, which has a ponderous, yet lyrical quality, not too dissimilar from the music of Bela Bartok, but which acquires a sublime quality when the clarinet enters and weaves an intricate pathway in and around the piano's progressions. The duo also played the title track from their most recent album, Rhyme or Reason, a more forthright and up-tempo excursion into their musical collaboration, with Hall's soprano saxophone soaring above some solid and insistent chordal progressions from the piano. By contrast, Pied Piper was a delightful frolic on sopranino sax that adequately demonstrated the impish qualities of that instrument. There were also interludes of spontaneously free form improvisations, where devoid of a notational base the musicians are free to play their own thing, but where listening is just as important as playing. These were also delightful and enjoyable.
There was something of a religious feel to much of the music and so it came as no surprise when Rob Hall announced a new work written over Easter and named after that feast day. Here he played tenor sax and the music was so delicate, so intricately woven, with silence and space as equally important as musical statement, that it engulfed and enthralled the audience to such an extent you could literally have heard a pin drop.
At Bixter, the duo played a first set of standards, where their musical talents were garnered in other directions from their usual playing, though equally enjoyable. At Lerwick an accomplished support set was provided by a young trio of Bobby Sutherland on drums, Max Tyler on piano and Norman Willmore on alto sax. Norman has become much more wholesome and attacking in his solos, a good sign, and he was called back at the end of the concert to play a version of Miles Davis' All Blues with Rob Hall and Chick Lyall, to the great delight of the audience, many of whom urged the organisers to haste the return to these shores of these two fine musicians.
The concerts were organised by Shetland Arts in conjunction with Shetland Jazz Club and the Hall/Lyall duo also worked with local students and school children in music workshops. So maybe they have left something of that musical magic behind them, eh?
Jeff Merrifield Shetland Times (May 2010) | |
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| 20th May 2010 |
Jazzwise Magazine |
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ROB HALL & CHICK LYALL
RHYME OR REASON CD Review - Jazzwise Magazine (May 2010)
*** FMR CD281-0909 | Rob Hall (ts, ss, sopranino sax, cl) and Chick Lyall (p)
Let’s begin with the obvious and oft-stated: jazz north of the border is in rude good health, as this second FMR collaboration from Scotland based duo Rob Hall and Chick Lyall demonstrates.
This series of fluently intimate dialogues between piano and reeds takes up where the pair’s first CD, The Beaten Path, left off. In terms of influences, the 13 original compositions move from jazz (the post bop of ‘The Maze’) to folk-traditional (breathe the immemorial Caledonian air on the lovely, gently jigging ‘Rub of the Green’) to, perhaps most imposingly, classical (‘Elegy’ and ‘Scherzo’ are movements from Hall’s ‘Sonata for Clarinet and Piano’). Strong throughout on atmosphere (the windingly hypnotic ‘Pied Piper’), Lyall and Hall are careful to counterbalance the demands of composition and improvisation throughout, spontaneous thoughts constantly pulling predetermined structures in fresh, new directions to provide a winning demonstration of the duo’s great empathy as performers (the stirringly shape-shifting ‘Michaelmas’ and the four freely improvised ‘Variant’ interludes).
I’m looking forward to their third collaboration already.
Robert Shore | |
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| 8th February 2010 |
The Scotsman **** |
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ROB HALL & CHICK LYALL
RHYME OR REASON CD Review - The Scotsman
SAXOPHONIST Rob Hall and pianist Chick Lyall have developed this duo over several years. Their second album builds on the strengths of The Beaten Path (2005), and replicates some of the earlier structural features of the earlier disc in its combination of compositions interspersed with wholly improvised interludes (labelled as Variants 1-4 here, and forming a sub plot of their own in the overall construct).
Hall does not include his alto saxophone this time, but is heard on tenor, soprano, and the more rarely encountered sopranino, as well as clarinet. Both players approach the music with real clarity of purpose and execution, playing off each other in creative fashion. Their intelligent and atmospheric music includes a couple of Celtic-influenced outings, Lyall's Rub of the Green and Hall's Pied Piper, and two movements adapted from the latter's Sonata for Clarinet and Piano.
Kenny Mathieson | |
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| 31st October 2008 |
Live Review / Sound Festival |
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SOUND FESTIVAL 2008 – ABERDEEN
Rob Hall & Chick Lyall
31 Oct Cowdray Hall, Aberdeen
The Lunch Break series along with sound and its Saxfest were all involved in bringing top flight duo Rob Hall (saxophones & clarinet) and Chick Lyall (piano & laptop/electronics) to Aberdeen. A small but very appreciative audience attended Friday's lunchtime concert that included two world premieres along with new pieces from their latest CD and three improvisations, two of those featuring laptop electronics.
Carousel by Rob Hall and the slow middle section of Three Movements for Sopranino Sax by Chick Lyall both featured the transparent smooth-soaring sounds of that rarer member of the sax family. Both, though not jazz in the strict sense of the term, had definite jazz-inspired influences; fresh sounding and wonderfully fluent in the case of Carousel, more pensive and with a midnight bluesy feel in Chick Lyall's piece. Its ambience reminded me just a little of the mood conjured up by Copland's Quiet City.
Beaten Path also by Chick Lyall for clarinet and piano is the title of their new CD. It was a gentle pastoral with an improvisatory-sounding central section for piano. Across The Sound by Rob Hall in which he used the tenor sax started gently and thoughtfully before its gathering rhythmic intensity picked up the audience and pulled them along with the music.
The first improvisation had a kind of tropical jungle backing with bird-like sounds and a rattle of castanets that could have been some exotic creature. Clarinet and piano added their vibrant playing to the mix. The secret of really good improvisation is that it should not really sound improvised at all and in their third such piece without electronics the duo knocked the music back and forth like a couple of champion table tennis players and they never missed the ball. It was a delight to watch and to listen to. I have been feeling a bit frazzled this week especially after trying to get parked near the Cowdray Hall on a busy Friday but I found Rob Hall and Chick Lyall's performance both relaxing and refreshing. I would recommend their music as a healing influence for a stressed out world.
Alan Cooper | |
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